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Data Borders: Three Years Later

What should we do today? How would you write Data Borders differently today? But what can I do? People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (Villa-Nicholas 2023), which examines the growing industry of data collection for the surveillance and control of immigrants in the United States. These questions arise in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, at academic conferences, and among public workers in the United States. I respond by advocating for policy protections for immigrant information rights, providing examples of data rights activism, and demonstrating how we are applying techno-imagined futures within my Southern California community to advocate for humane shifts in technological design and data collection. (more…) (read more...)

Gender Dimensions of Platform Work: How Do They Shape Unionizing?

This article is the fourth article in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction to the series here, the second post in the series here, and the third post here. In January 2024, hundreds of women workers associated with the on-demand home services app Urban Company (henceforth UC) gathered in protest outside the platform’s regional office in Hyderabad, India. The workers, many of whom were working as beauticians on the app, were protesting a slew of platform policies that had steadily eroded their working conditions over time (Figure 1). Most notable of these was the introduction of a new feature called ‘auto-assign’, which requires workers to mark the time slots that they are available to work on the app, following which they are assigned gigs automatically by the platform. The new ‘auto-assign’ policy marked a (read more...)

Techno-Ethics and Feminist AI: What Role for an African Studies Approach to Science and Technology?

This post is inspired by the collaborative conceptualization of a workshop on African feminist AI held at ETHOS Lab in May 2025. It is deeply indebted to the ideas shared by the workshop organizers and participants. (more…) (read more...)